Even in twilight of Te Kanawa's career, soprano remains a regal presence

For many classical artists, the road to retirement is paved with lingering glances back to past glories, calculated to stir sentimental memories in their fans. The beloved operatic and concert singer Kiri Te Kanawa has been plying that route since giving what she announced would be her operatic swan song, in her touchstone role of the Marschallin in Richard Strauss' "Der Rosenkavalier," in Cologne, Germany, in 2009.

But the New Zealand-born soprano, who turned 68 in March, clearly enjoys presenting concerts and recitals too much to give them up just yet. Te Kanawa devotees would have it no other way. And her deep investment in vocal training, through the Solti Te Kanawa Accademia (a summer opera school on the Tuscan coast of Italy) and her own Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation, has kept her busy doing master classes throughout the world, such as the one she gave Sunday at Ravinia's Steans Music Institute.

By no means did the recital of songs and arias Dame Kiri delivered Tuesday evening in Ravinia's Martin Theatre present the audience with the sorry spectacle of an over-the-hill diva who really should pack it in. Agreed, the once voluptuously beautiful voice isn't what it was, and certain high notes were pinched. So what? There was much fine singing by way of counterbalance, laced with charm and sincerity and the insights gleaned from an international career that has spanned more than 40 years.

Together with her supportive pianist, Kevin Murphy, director of the Steans vocal program, the diva sang a short program of relatively undemanding pieces in Italian, French, German and English, chosen to sit comfortably in a now somewhat curtailed range. She cut as beautiful and glamorous a figure as ever, swaddled in yards of what looked like shiny orange taffeta. The audience applauded every song and awarded her several standing ovations at the end.

Younger singers could learn a lot from Te Kanawa's ability to employ the intimacy of the recital medium to expressive advantage. They could also profit by the care with which she's husbanded her vocal resources over the years. The well-remembered legato line remains intact, and she connected long phrases to rapturous effect in the Liszt song "Oh! Quand je dors." Her best singing continues to lie in the upper middle of her range, a register Strauss' "Morgen" displayed becomingly in the soprano's measured, affecting rendition.

Te Kanawa made her way gingerly through an opening group of Italian Baroque arias, warm-up exercises for the heavier Liszt and Strauss fare. Three songs from Berlioz's cycle "Les nuits d'ete" were idiomatically sung but needed more exactitude of pitch and a richer spectrum of vocal colors than the singer now commands. After bidding farewell to Manon's little table in an aria from the Massenet opera, she delivered one of her signature arias, "Marietta's Lied," from Korngold's "Die Tote Stadt."

During her prime as an operatic artist, Dame Kiri tended to keep emotion at arm's length. She does so no longer, if the two dramatic scenas with which she ended each half of Tuesday's recital were any indication.

Vanessa's big scene, "Do Not Utter a Word," from Samuel Barber's "Vanessa," may be soap-opera hokum, but it is hokum of a most agreeable sort. Te Kanawa, who had portrayed the eponymous heroine at the Los Angeles Opera in 2004, fully realized the lyrical agonies of a woman who has waited 20 years for her lover's return, only to discover, horrified, that the Anatol who stands in front of her is not her lover, but his son. Murphy gamely delivered the young man's single line.

So, too, was Te Kanawa fully inside the words and music of Jake Heggie's Final Monologue from "Master Class,"the Terrence McNally play based on the master classes the great soprano Maria Callas conducted at the Juilliard School of Music in 1971-72. "I am certain that what we do matters," that "we have made this world a better place," says Callas at one point in the text. "Whether I continue singing doesn't matter. Besides, it's all there in the recordings."

Much the same observations could serve as Te Kanawa's own testament to a glorious career.